# ML-driven detection and reduction of ballast information in multi-modal datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16876 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16876/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07669/) (2019)
- [Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model Training with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04391/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Optimization of Storage Systems Using Reinforcement Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00068/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern datasets often contain ballast as redundant or low-utility information that increases dimensionality, storage requirements, and computational cost without contributing meaningful analytical value. This study introduces a generalized, multimodal framework for ballast detection and reduction across structured, semi-structured, unstructured, and sparse data types. Using diverse datasets, entropy, mutual information, Lasso, SHAP, PCA, topic modelling, and embedding analysis are applied to identify and eliminate ballast features. A novel Ballast Score is proposed to integrate these signals into a unified, cross-modal pruning strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that significant portions of the feature space as often exceeding 70% in sparse or semi-structured data, can be pruned with minimal or even improved classification performance, along with substantial reductions in training time and memory footprint. The framework reveals distinct ballast typologies (e.g. statistical, semantic, infrastructural), and offers practical guidance for leaner, more efficient machine learning pipelines.